Every year the Game Developers Conference hosts hundreds of fascinating talks across all aspects of game design, technology, and gaming, but most people will never see them. It’s all the way over in San Francisco and tickets cost a bomb, for starters. Thankfully, they record them all, each year set a fair chunk free for everyone to see.

This year’s GDC Vault has opened up with hundreds of free sessions, and we’ve got a few recommendations for you, covering topics from Loom to lessons learned in failure.

Those man-murdering Assassins will be larking about in 2.5 dimensions soon, or 3.5 if you count time, as Ubisoft have announced a whole subseries of side-on spin-offs set across different eras.

We already knew about Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China [official site] as Ubi offered it as part of the ill-fated Season Pass for Assassin’s Creed Unity. Now they’ve also announced India and Russia games, as well as an April 22nd release date for China, which will come first.

I managed to get hopelessly lost on my way to last week’s Dirty Bomb [Steam page] event, squirrelled away in the trendy thicket of London’s Old Truman Brewery. Annoying? Yes. Fitting? Absolutely. Splash Damage has a multitude of demons to slay with its latest spin on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory – the ever-controversial choice of a free-to-play model, the spectre of Brink, its previous stab at a new IP – but the most fearsome of these demons is surely London itself. London, a city that’s actually a bunch of medieval villages mashed into each other, where roads designed for horses struggle to find room for buses and Range Rovers. London, a metropolis blown half to bits during World War 2, then mutated into absurd, glittering shapes by overseas investors. London, where heading a mile downriver feels like setting foot on a different planet.

You couldn’t ask for a less elegant setting for a multiplayer FPS in the Team Fortress vein, where a single sightline askew can be the difference between enjoyment and fury, but the studio has done a bang-up job. In fact, one of this formidable, comfortable shooter’s greatest strengths is how it chisels readable warrens of coverspots, overlooks and chokepoints out of the capital’s beguiling weirdness. London is everywhere in Dirty Bomb, from its red letterboxes to the graceful arches of Waterloo Station, but unlike the reality, it’s seldom inconvenient. It never gets in your way.

We only hear whispers from deep in the belly of AAA development, reports from PR trips where everyone’s on their best behaviour and whispers in alleys from shadowy strangers wearing trenchcoats. What’s it really like? What happens when a game in a multimillion dollar series is shaping up rubbish? Everyone wants to murder their workmates by the end, right?

The Writer Will Do Something [official page] is a funny and grim free Twine game looking into a key development meeting for ShatterGate: Future Perfect, the third game in a fictional series at a fictional studio, written by someone who’s worked inside AAA.

Etherium [official site] is fast-paced and energetic but it won’t leave you suffering from a sugar crash. It can pack a punch but it doesn’t burn like a slug of bouron. Etherium is, in fact, like a glass of water. It’s not much to look at and while you’re drinking it, you might envy those whose refreshments have been invigorated by the addition of sugar, hops, caffeine or brewed leaves. You probably wouldn’t want to drink it all the time but you’d rarely turn a glass down – and sometimes it’s exactly what you need.

]]>http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/31/wot-i-think-etherium/feed/2http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/31/wot-i-think-etherium/Colossus Deathbot Lets You Nuke Your Minecraft Foeshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RockPaperShotgun/~3/8Ua2b_Txktw/
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/03/31/colossus-minecraft/#commentsTue, 31 Mar 2015 15:00:35 +0000http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=279363“Oooh! A rendering of Alexandra Palace in Minecraft? I wonder if they included the ice cream van because… wait, someone built a walking attack robot colossus?” That was a faithful recreation of the experience of browsing the Minecraft subreddit today.

There’s already been a Cities: Skylines [official site] mod that lets you wander your streets from a low, ‘first-person’ style camera, but what about doing it with a friend? Reddit user ‘Fr0sZ’ posted a video today of his work-in-progress Cities Skylines multiplayer mod, in which each player is represented in the world as a pedestrian avatar and able to walk around. See below.

Introversion Software previously made a game called DEFCON [official site], a strategy game in which you launch often unprovoked nuclear attacks upon other countries. Global thermonuclear war is the core of the game, and necessary if you’re going to defeat your opponents, but it never revels in the wanton destruction you’re carrying out. As the death toll rises into the millions, the grim reality of what’s happening is gently communicated through the stark white alerts of how many millions have been killed and through the addition of quiet coughing to the game’s soundtrack.

I’ve killed million and millions in DEFCON. I’m not sure I could bring myself to kill just one person in Prison Architect [official site] using update 31’s newly introduced execution chambers. There’s a video below showing how the process works.

Do I want movies on Steam? Not really, given how much of a labyrinth it already is for games alone. On the other hand, my intrinsic inertia makes the idea of everything under one icon vaguely appealing. It’s unclear whether Valve even intends Steam to be a true one-stop multimedia shop, although the mind inevitably turns to how their upcoming SteamVR tech could be turned to cinema-aping movie-viewing (complete with clumsy stagger through the dark to the loos during a quiet bits). Tellingly, the service is also on the verge of its first non-non-fiction movie release, a Devolver-distributed horror/comedy flick named Motivational Growth. It’s also out on GoG, plus the console stores.
… [visit site to read more]

Just the other day I was talking about another action-RPG from Japanese developers Nihon Falcom coming our way (Ys VI, there), when lawks a lummy look! Another one’s already here, as an English translation of Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure [official site] launched yesterday.

It’s a cutesy adventure about a girl, her monster friends (who are invisible to adults, obvs), and her magical drill. Together, they fight evil spirits and save the village. Adventure! It looks all cutey-cute, but I have heard some fairly good things about the old PSP port.

All good and freeware things must eventually come to an end and the very same applies to my dear Freeware Garden and its all singing, all dancing games. This, wonderful readers, is the final post in the series and my chance to admit how much I enjoyed writing it and to thank team RPS for giving me the chance to take this huge freeware burden off my chest. Oh, and to let you know which five games I covered I loved the most. These: